


blokadniki

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1950s, Alternate Universe, Cold War, M/M, Russian Bucky Barnes, Siege of Leningrad, USSR (CCCP), Vietnam War, WWII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-12
Updated: 2016-08-12
Packaged: 2018-08-08 08:04:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7749841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vovik became a man while his city starved. He became a soldier under his mother's sights. And he became something more the year he met the American captain, when they traded manifestos and chose liberty instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	blokadniki

**Author's Note:**

> This was the [prompt](https://toli-a.tumblr.com/post/137349631028/i-dunno-if-youre-still-accepting-prompts-but-on): Bucky is a sworn and solemn Russian soldier who meets Captain America during a temporary ceasefire. - I assumed “ceasefire” meant that Steve and Bucky were supposed to be on opposite sides, so not WWII. (And on that same thought, not the Russian Civil War (c.1918) because the Americans weren’t involved, though boy would that one be fun!)
> 
> So, places a Soviet soldier (or, ‘ground support in favor of national liberation movements’) could have met a US soldier (or, “military advisor”)? Afghanistan, where Steve would probably be CIA, but who doesn’t want to hear about jump-starting conflict in the 21st century with the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? (Sadly, this is not that story.) Which leaves, as far as my intensive Wikipedia search on Cold War “military aid” went: Vietnam. So I gave up on most of the prompt and went for the 1950s, because I wanted Bucky to be blokadnik (which, thanks to a helpful reader, I have now learned is the male singular form of 'blokadniki'). What does that mean? _A lot._ It means, as far as my paltry Russian, 'people of the blockade', separated from the rest of the USSR by their survival in the [Siege of Leningrad](http://www.saint-petersburg.com/history/great-patriotic-war-and-siege-of-leningrad/%22) (see also [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad%22)).

Vladimir Ivanovich Kuznetsov, Vovik, was ten years old when the siege began. He was young enough to go with the children, small enough to be torn from his aunt’s arms and placed in a train car, sent outside the city lines to safety and food.

Vovik had hidden in an alley, instead, crept into the cupboard and ignored his aunt’s cries until night fell and the train was gone. His father had promised to come home from Moscow for New Year’s, to bring word of his mother and the rifle she brought to protect the front lines. How would Ivan find his son, if Vovik left? And his mother — [Lyudmila](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Pavlichenko), the best sniper in the Red Army — would never forgive him, if he abandoned his city to the fascists and ran away.

Vovik’s mother despised cowards. They were traitors, she had spat, slamming down their dinner plates and scowling at her husband, still in his lab coat with his glasses sliding down his long nose. And traitors did not deserve to live.

When the siege ended - nine hundred long, gaunt, endless days after it began - Vovik was a man. He was more than any man beyond the borders of Leningrad could claim: he was _blokadnik,_ born full-grown from the war.

He was twelve years old, and perhaps even smaller than he had been in 1941, still missing several teeth that had come out before his adult teeth had ever planned to grow in. He had not been to school since the first winter, when two of his teachers had died: one from starvation, and one for the rations she had held in her bony hands.

His father’s sister, the only aunt who’d noticed when Vovik ran away, had died on the front lines, trained as a nurse and stronger than most even in the hungriest days of winter.

Vovik’s father came home after the blockade was gone, searching for his son. He walked right past Vovik and into the orphanage, and would not be convinced that the emaciated, unkempt boy was his until Vladimir Ivanovich Kuznetsov recited his entire childhood, up to the moment it had ended in 1941. Then the balding, well-fed man in front of him sank to his knees and cried, his glasses fogging in the winter air, his hands stained with grease but not cracked from the cold. Vovik blinked at him. No one had cried in Leningrad for centuries; not since Vovik was still a boy.

His mother did not come home. The Red Army sent them a medal. They said that she had died in service to a great and glorious cause, to the liberation of the world. They did not send a body. Vovik looked over his shoulder for years, searching for the glint of his mother’s rifle, the feel of her gaze on the exposed skin of his neck on the days he dreamed of train cars and abundance found far away. Lyudmila thought that any man who did not love the Party was a traitor, and traitors did not deserve to live.

Vovik joined the army in 1950, after his father died in prison for having been foolish enough to love Leningrad more than Moscow, even more foolish to say so aloud. He denounced his father, spat at the mention of his father’s political friends, and kept a faded picture of his mother’s scowl on display. The Politburo might not trust him, but Vovik had his parents’ skills — could design guns and rockets, calculate their dimensions in his head just as he calculated how to aim the rifle for his next kill — and the Soviet Army was too smart to kill him when it could use him instead. Vovik was smart, as well: he was _blokadnik,_ and knew how to survive.

They sent him to Hanoi in 1956, when the Capitalist Powers unified to keep their colonies, to squeeze Africa and Asia until they bled. The French were weak, but the Americans were not, and in 1956 the United States had sworn to prevent liberation in Vietnam.

Vovik’s limited Vietnamese was the sort that soldiers used, invective-laced phrases learned from a few of the men that had followed their leader to Moscow years before. His officers thought he knew all he needed, though, reclassified him as a shipment of weapons, and shipped him south to arm and train the Viet Minh.

He met Captain Steven Grant Rogers in Saigon, after he tried to kill him. It was 1957, and Vovik had laid on the ground, waiting for a clear shot, and thought of the intricate, minute dance of atoms in a bomb that would dismantle the colonial puppet government faster than his rifle and his vulgar, gasoline and dynamite bombs ever could.

Vovik kept his hair long enough to hide his high forehead and European eyes, and no one noticed him laying out their destruction. No one except Captain Rogers, who tackled him just as Vovik’s compatriots lit the fuse.

Vovik was _blokadnik,_ smarter and stronger than any child not killed in Leningrad in 1941, any capitalist pig or Party fool. He had learned to fight at the same time he’d learned to steal and run, hitting hard and wriggling like an eel to get away with a crust of bread, but the captain seemed prepared for those tactics, and pinned Vovik to the ground as the building collapsed around them.

He said something incomprehensible — English, Vovik assumed — blue eyes wide as he stared at Vovik’s face, then switched to poorly pronounced Russian when it was clear that Vovik didn’t understand. “You are not Viet!” the blond man declared, the length of his body pressing Vovik into the shuddering floor.

“Neither are you,” Vovik replied, twisting sideways and failing to dislodge the American at all. He stopped trying, after that: either the man’s grip would slacken and Vovik would escape, which seemed unlikely given the steel of the captain’s grip, or he was already dead and on his way to becoming the Soviet martyr his mother had always dreamed.

 

“You fight for colonial oppression,” Vovik pointed out, leaning back in his cell and waving away yet another capitalist manifesto that Steven tried to shove through the bars. “Your country kills everyone they cannot control.”

Vovik did not understand why Steven Grant Rogers came to see him so often, but there was little to do in prison, and he was not about to turn the man away.

Steven wrinkled his nose and wiggled his head the way he did when he didn’t want to say something that would betray his Party. “Well, so do you,” he responded, and laughed when Vovik rolled his eyes. “Besides, we’re fighting for -”

“Liberation,” they said in unison, because it turned out their manifestos were not so different after all.

“You could defect,” Steven said quietly, after they had sat in silence for some time, breathing the humid air and the smell of urine soaked into damp concrete, listening to the echoing footsteps of guards beyond the prison’s walls. He stared at his hands, circling his thumbs around each other and avoiding Vovik’s gaze.

“You could let me go,” Vovik replied, because he was _blokadnik,_ because he knew how to creep out of a fortress and into a city under siege.

Steven shook his head. “If I let you go, you’ll keep killing people,” he answered, lifting his head and watching Vovik with regret, as though Vovik’s talent with a gun was all that prevented decorated Capt. Rogers from breaking the law and betraying his country’s cause.

“And what is it that I would do if I joined you?” Vovik asked drily. “Garden?” The side of Steven’s mouth lifted in a smile, but he didn’t say anything. Vovik sighed. “Steven. You could defect. Your country hates the poor. They killed your mother,” he added, because Steve had told him about Sarah Rogers, about the tuberculosis that settled in her lungs and the bills they couldn’t pay. Steve could stuff manifestos into his pockets and through the bars of Vovik’s cell, but he could not hide his grief, his anger at the capitalism that had let his mother die.

“I know my country isn’t perfect,” Steve told him, stretching out his hands and curling his fingers around the bars that separated them. “But I can make it better. _We_ can make it better, and if we tried to do that in your country we’d just end up dead.”

Vovik thought of his father, hunched and frail at the tribunal, protesting that he loved the Party that wanted him to bleed.

“We cannot do that if we are here,” he finally said, tracing the scar on the back of his left hand, a burn when he’d pressed too close to the guttering warmth of the stove in 1942, living on the memory of bread and desperate for warmth. “Unless you believe that _liberation_ is the fight for a better world.”

He had not agreed with anything that Steve said; he had not joined the capitalist regime, or promised to defect, but Steve reached through the bars and grasped Vovik’s hand as though they had signed an oath, grinning so widely that his jaw must have ached.

“You’re right,” Steven Grant Rogers told him, the sweaty palm of his hand pressed against Vovik’s scar, thrumming with something that Vovik did not dare to name. “We can’t do that here. We’ll have to pick a new fight.”

The siege had taught Vladimir Ivanovich Kuznetsov many things (and this time he did not look over his shoulder, did not wait for the death that his mother dealt to traitors as he took Steven Grant Rogers’s hand and ran away).

**Author's Note:**

> Bucky’s mother is named after a famous Soviet sniper (link in text), and Bucky’s name is a mash up of [snipers](http://www.militaryeducation.org/10-deadliest-snipers-of-world-war-2/) and people killed in the [Leningrad Affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_Affair) that also kills his fictional father. For one account of the Siege of Leningrad, go [here](http://jewishexponent.com/surviving-the-leningrad-blockade-an-autobiographical-account), though many people were encouraged to keep journals during the Siege, so there are others.
> 
> And in my head, Steve and Vovik go back to the US and start causing all sorts of trouble (in rough form, this was titled "The Adventures of Vovik and Steve").


End file.
